Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

chess.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 486 posts

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#251

Post by sriram_malhar »

Dalewyn wrote: post #110
fsckboy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your attitude about chess competition was applied toward you in all of your routine irl activities, you would be extremely unhappy. The cop does better in his job by meeting his quota of speeding tickets, so it objectively makes sense that he would issue you a speeding ticket every day with no evidence and over your strenuous objections... except you wouldn't object because the cop is working the system rationally…

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another. Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy o…

I'm just happy to say that most people that I call my friends don't share your vision of what it means to have a life well-lived, or how they define success, or have lived with this attitude of dirt and ruthlessness being necessary.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#252

Post by _the_inflator »

lysp wrote: post #19

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. > Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest Wow.

The trouble I have is, that Hans is 19. Given the accusations and his own confession, he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Hans confessed to have cheated at age 12 and 16.

Since cheating is arguable habit forming, he simply based his career on cheating. Where others put in the mileage, he invested in his cheating expertise.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#253

Post by runnerup »

notfed wrote: post #217
htrqball wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> He seemed a bit on the spectrum and oversharing, literally hyperventilating and not talking in coherent sentences. Yeah, not really. He's 19 and is a non-native English speaker. He understands that he's under siege and has to show some vulnerability to gain trust in listeners. IMO, the way he spoke was completely in accordance with all of this, while also remaining coherent.

He’s born in San Francisco, very classic white American native. While he did spend ages 7-10 in the Netherlands, he went to high school in Connecticut and New York. His uncharacteristic accent is from spending the last few years studying chess in Europe.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#254

Post by rowanG077 »

kadoban wrote: post #180
patmcc wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). I think it's the other way, chess is about as easy to cheat as it gets. With chess you can have a perfectly usable cheating system that isn't on the same computer at all - computer A is clean, and is where you actually play on chess.com, computer B is where you ent…

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student. Strategy games may be harder, bu…

I doubt that since a weekend project. You need to analyze a video stream of hundreds fps in real time with very low latency requirments. You'd probably need an FPGA to do that. Custom training an AI to only trigger on heads.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#255

Post by [deleted] »

crystaln wrote: post #143
crystaln wrote: post #20

Seems to be happening in the poker world as well. https://twitter.com/dexerto/status/1575867098328289280

In my poker heyday, I made similar call downs in big games when I read someone for a straight draw and had a backup flush draw as she did. If you know they are going to bluff if they miss, it's very profitable and also maddeningly tilt inducing. I once called $5k cold on the river and won with J high and several over cards on the board in what ended up a $15k+ pot. Her move esp by a somewhat amateur player is not tha…

[deleted]

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#256

Post by warent »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #134
lysp wrote: post #19

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. > Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest Wow.

In my opinion, this sort of ad-hoc stereotyping weakens the rest of the analysis. There are plenty of counterexamples. Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19 and is still ranked World No. 9 currently (at age 52). Ding Liren (Current No. 2) became a GM at 17. Grischuk (currently No. 17, peak No.3) became a GM at 17. All three have crossed 2800 ELO at some point. I hope this is not the sort of analysis t…

Don't forget Sam Shankland! He became a GM at the age of 20 and is now one of the top players in the world (Super GM status)

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#257

Post by Dalewyn »

Thorrez wrote: post #232
Dalewyn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception. For the purposes of this discussion, I define "legitimate" as whether anyone wants to cry foul on a player's performance. If a player cheats but doesn't get caught, it's legitimate because nobody can cry foul and make it into a problem. >As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion tha…

> That not cheating is stupid. Hans cheated in over 100 online chess matches, and now he's stuck in this giant controversy. If he didn't cheat in those matches, none of this controversy would have happened, and he would be judged based on his skill.

I would argue his failing wasn't that he cheated, but that he got caught by cheating too obviously against someone who wasn't going to take it lying down.

The people who succeed cheat only as far as to reap the rewards while avoiding the risks thereof, they pick the time and place to cheat and not cheat. Of course, we don't know as third-parties whether any such successful individuals are in fact cheaters or not since nobody caught them.

To put it another way, if Neiman cheated in over 100 online chess matches and nobody caught him, we wouldn't know he's a cheater and we would judge him based off his apparent "skill". Thus, cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#258

Post by Taek »

krick wrote: post #199
cowvin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most interesting (but inconclusive) points they found was how Hans' evaluated strength dropped after they introduced the 15 minute broadcast delay.

Except, introducing the 15 minute broadcast delay just happens to coincide with Magnus scandalous withdrawal, Hans being especially carefully searched and being stared at by everyone (that is, if we trust how it was evaluated over a couple of games in the first place). So, again, even though some statement from chess.com was expected, this one probably does more harm than good. Heavy implications, winking and chuckli…

I do think all of the implications on Hans are well deserved, and the deep exploration of cheating within the chess world is well placed. And after looking through the evidence myself, I do believe that Hans is cheating in over-the-board games. I don't think any of the analysis presented on YouTube have yet met a sufficient standard of quality (statistical mistakes everywhere), but I do have faith that someone will come forward with an analysis that both doesn't make any mistakes and also firmly implicates Hans is a cheater. Time will tell.

I also agree that Hans material drop in performance after the broadcast delay could be reasonably attributed to:

1. he's 19 2. the best chess player in the world said he's a dirty cheater

Such circumstances would throw off many prodigal 19 year old's, I'm sure his emotions got in the way of his playing. (I also believe he was cheating here, but I don't think the drop in his performance meets any standard for acceptable evidence)

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#259

Post by computerdork »

htrqball wrote: post #34
erdevs wrote: post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

Quoted post unavailable.

It's a good point, I do also think that people (especially on social media) are too quick these days to jump all over any minor mistake a person makes. But (in my humble opinion), if the report is correct, then Niemann went waay too far, beyond a little lying and cheating to possibly raising himself at the highest levels of chess (and winning actual money). Yeah, as you probably saw, it says he cheated online an estimated 100 times, some for actual prize events (amongst other implications).

Yeah, personally, I do believe the report as it does seem to match a lot of other online analysis of his game history (this isn't the greatest video, but it is compelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjtbXxA8Fcc).

And sure, it does seem cruel to call him out in an interview, but so is cheating to get to the top. Yeah, someone who cheated on this scale has robbed those players of the recognition and prize money they worked so hard to deserve. Honest players who have probably devoted way more time than Niemann had (the two years of study you mentioned is impressive, but maybe others have studied like this for decades??)

Post reply on HN